Julian Faulhaber’s photographs come with simple titles, such as “Dividing Wall”, “Garage”, “Rear Exit” or “Bar Top”. They exude a quite intoxicating and yet frightening sense of artificiality. Laid out like so many amuse gueules, fuel pumps and a vacuum cleaner module stand beneath the illuminated roof of a gas station. A sports hall shrinks to the scale of a pink architectural model. A ventilation shaft mutates into a painting that Ad Reinhardt would have loved. A supermarket resembles the gateway to a completely different world. Shelves and strip lights soak up innumerable memories of paintings. And a bar top awaits the time when it can cease to exist as a sculpture. People are nowhere to be seen. They have been banished from this place completely. As have dirt, misery and life. Here, the image rules in solitary splendor. Only its logic counts, defined by the choice of section, the light, the colors, and the details. Everything is surface and surface is all that remains of everything. As if our cities and buildings suddenly consisted only of renderings. As if the world had withdrawn completely into reproductions of itself. As if all that were left was a spectacular, cool and discomfiting illusion. As if “LDPE” were not only the designation for low-density polyethylene, those low-density strongly branched polymer chains. (tw)

Julian Faulhaber
LDPE
80 pages, hardcover, cloth
Trademark Publishing, Frankfurt/Main, 2015,
ISBN 978-3-9817475-1-5
EUR 38.00